Jon Johansen writes patch for Google Video Viewer

James Delahunty
29 Jun 2005 23:27

Jon Lech Johansen, or "DVD Jon", has released a patch that will allow users of Google Video Viewer to play videos that are not hosted on Google's servers. Google has Limited the player to videos from the Google servers only, which can be seen here...

+ // Google mods
+ const char* allowed_host = "video.google.com";
+ char * host_found = strstr(p_sys->url.psz_host, allowed_host);
+ if ((host_found == NULL) ||
+ ((host_found + strlen(allowed_host)) !=
+ (p_sys->url.psz_host + strlen(p_sys->url.psz_host)))) {
+ msg_Warn( p_access, "invalid host, only video.google.com is allowed" );
+ goto error;
+ }

You can find a link to the patch on Johansen's Blog. Using the patch requires the .NET framework which can be downloaded from Microsoft's homepage. The source code is now also available on the blog. Of course this patch has been completely misunderstood by many news websites who are reporting Johansen has "cracked Google's video security". Actually Google has made public the changes applied to the VideoLAN client, on which the Google Video client is based on. Therefore the patch is quite trivial, and should not be compared to, for example, Johansen's work with CSS and iTunes.
Sources:
So Sue Me Blog
p2pnet

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